Return Flight
Eight hours over the blank blue Pacific break on the cliffs and spires of San Francisco. Water succumbs to land. This flight once eastbound now arrives from the west.
We float over the Golden Gate. From the ground this airship seems almost still.
A few moments, then, for the mind to hover upon last details, until we crash to the asphalt.
A few days ago, the Governor of California warned of a "credible threat" of terrorism to the city's bridges. We are virtually low enough to discern individual suspension cables, the colors of bicycles. But it will not be my jet that gets the spectacular aerial view of the destruction.
We drift above downtown. Will we instead plow into the Transamerica pyramid on a jihad dive? Better: The catastrophic earthquake scientists have predicted ever since the discovery of the San Andreas Fault will swallow the city, in almighty ridicule of the political brink.
A city on alert, a country on edge. It seems much longer than two months since I left.
We bank gently south and soon we can see the airport, which is not in San Francisco proper but a suburb called Burlingame. Many urban airports are not in their nominal cities: Del Valle for Austin, Morrisville for Raleigh-Durham. After 9/11, the reasoning that removes airports from urban centers seems especially sound. These are latent disasters, potential quarantines. Put it in Warwick, or build a new town out there and call it Seatac.
We fly over the airport and flip hard 180 degrees to set up a northward approach. The starboard wing dives steeply. The ground pulls nauseously close. We begin spiralling to earth. The man sitting in front of me misidentifies almost everything below us. He calls a small green patch of South San Francisco "The Presidio." He points at a high school ballfield and pronounces it Candlestick Park. He's got that characteristically American admixture of ignorance and arrogance. He lays claim to what he does not know. He flaunts what he hasn't got. He should be in advertising.
We level off. We are over water that rises to meet us. Now our speed shows its full force, headlong and thundersome, blasting molecules. We are Japan Airlines Flight #002 and we slam to the ground -- we dent the earth -- it weighs more because of us -- and we race and ratchet down to mortal velocity. We taxi in... we dock. I wipe my sleepless eyes and rise from my seat in the second-to-last row of the 747.
It is now technically eight hours earlier than it was when I left Tokyo. I have not seen darkness for 24 hours, and I am in the Northwest rather than the Southeast. Space and time have lost their purchase.
I steel myself for reentry. I'm an olive-skinned man of murky ethnicity, returning from Jakarta and listing "writer" (ha!) as his profession (ha! ha!). They should give me the full course: grill me, search my stuff. Make sure I am the graying reissue of the young man in the passport photo; protect the soil from the possibility that I have come to ruin it. I want them to lead me into a windowless room and pour themselves acrid coffee and light cigarettes and scowl, and then I want to convince them -- candidly, calmly -- that I belong in this country where I have always felt like an outsider.
We deplane, we line up at immigration. I show the man my passport. He stamps it and hands it back to me, mute. We collect our bags. A couple of bored security guards stand around. I give my declaration form to the customs officer. He takes it without looking at it or me, and I am instantaneously out of San Francisco Airport. Unsearched, uninterrogated, untouched and unseen.
